The UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) will launch its High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) report on "Agroecological and other innovative approaches for sustainable agriculture and food systems that enhance food security and nutrition” on July 3 in Rome. This report is the outcome of a consultation process where participants in the Civil Society and Indigenous People's Mechanism (CSM) have fought hard to distinguish agroecology as a practice, science, and politics from other "industrial" innovations such as so-called "sustainable intensification", biotechnology, and biofortification.

The next step - already agreed-upon by governments - is to use the report to guide a policy negotiation process at the CFS Plenary 46 in October 2019. The work ahead is to advocate for governments to commit to developing and implementing policies needed to address the root causes of hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity. The CFS policy process, despite its many challenges, is a political tool we can use to push governments to realise the right to food for all, respect and protect local regenerative agriculture and indigenous food systems and strengthen biodiversity through an inclusive, bottom-up political process.

Read on for AFSA president Tammi Jonas' assessment of the Canberra seminar, put together by the CFS HLPE and CSIRO...and the challenges still to come.

The seminar was not particularly well advertised amongst farmers and their representative bodies, and I believe AFSA was the only representative organisation for farmers who attended. In fact, I learned about the seminar from activists and FAO staff in Rome – not through any local channels. Conversely, Bayer was there – the world’s largest supplier of seed and agri-chemicals after last year’s merger with Monsanto – they now control about 25% of the seed & pesticide market globally.

The event started out promisingly enough, with assertions that it used to be ‘agriculture versus the environment’ but that ‘that time is over,’ and repeated assurances that we are beyond the time for business-as-usual approaches given the urgency of the need for radically different agricultural practices in the face of a rapidly changing climate.

The Chair of the HLPE Steering Committee Patrick Caron gave an insightful overview of the context of the report on agroecology and ‘other innovations’, in which he pointed out that ‘when people talk about agroecology, sustainable intensification, precision agriculture – they have very different things in mind…’. Caron explained that this report’s role is to understand disagreements and to shape the international agenda.

He was followed by Fergus Lloyd Sinclair of the Agroforestry Institute in Nairobi, the HLPE Project Team Leader, who presented a very encouraging update on their work on the report to date. He first candidly shared what a ‘schizophrenic terms of reference’ the HLPE was given by the CFS, pointing out that ‘agroecology’ and ‘other innovations’ can be distinguished on the basis of principles. Sinclair asserted that ‘agroecology is a dynamic space, with many actors… not prescribed… locally defined in different ways by the people who are practicing it…’ and that there is a ‘strong connection between indigenous knowledge, traditional agriculture systems, and science.’

He went on to explain that agroecology as an innovation is easily distinguished from other approaches such as ‘sustainable intensification’ (and ‘climate smart agriculture’, ‘nutrient sensitive agriculture’, because agroecology (which may broadly include aspects of organic agriculture, agroforestry, silvopastoralism, and permaculture) is labour intensive rather than capital intensive. It relies on the humans in its system for knowledge and labour rather than capital intensive technological innovations that seek to largely replace human labour and often even knowledge.

Sinclair also explained the HLPE’s pitch to include ‘agency’ as a fifth pillar of food security – a concept already fundamental to food sovereignty, which asserts everyone’s right to collectively participate in food and agriculture systems.

After this rousing start, we watched as the CSIRO took to the podium. After thanking her colleagues from the HLPE and agreeing that we cannot continue with ‘business as usual’ approaches, the Acting Deputy Director of Food and Agriculture gave a 20-minute presentation on business as usual. She started with some stats:

Australia is 6th largest land size country in world and 55th largest population

She then asserted that ongoing innovations are needed to protect our natural resources as well as agriculture, requiring new forms of surveillance. Wait, what? Next, regarding upcoming innovations, she said, ‘I aspire for a future where Australian ag is a price-setter in the global market.’ Okay, but what about agroecology?

Here’s a list of some of the non-business-as-usual innovations cited by the CSIRO at this seminar on agroeocology and other innovations:

Leaf oils – ‘game changer for global oil production’ – a seed output as well as a leaf output

I guess the CSIRO is more in the ‘other innovations’ camp. (In fact when a like-minded colleague asked the CSIRO speaker between sessions why she didn’t speak about agroecology, she responded that she was ‘instructed not to.’ Let that sink in for a minute.)

Our mates from Bayer were the first question off the rank after the opening speakers, revisiting a point Sinclair made about an ‘increasing moralisation around food.’ The Bayer rep asked Sinclair how he believes the ‘moralisation of food’ impacts on equity. It is a tried and true rhetorical trick from industrial ag proponents, who often seek to establish their own moral position with appeals to equal access and the role of (presumed but not always proven) cheap technologies (that they own) to ‘feed the masses.’ They may as well exclaim, ‘Let them eat cake!’ and be done with it. Whether posed as a question or an assertion, this device always wilfully ignores earlier expert points that hunger is not caused by scarcity of food, but rather by failures in governance and distribution.

During the break I was introduced to another CSIRO senior staffer as the president of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance. His response was to raise his eyebrows and yelp, ‘Food sovereignty? That raises alarm bells with policy people!’ To which I calmly responded, ‘Really? Policymakers are alarmed by peoples’ right to democratically participate in the food and agriculture system?’ ‘Yes!’ he intoned, ‘Internationally it impedes trade!’

I think that rather than bore you with the rest of what we heard from the CSIRO at the seminar, all of which is in line with what’s cited above and demonstrates their slavish devotion to free trade in capitalist global markets to the detriment of most farmers and eaters everywhere, I’ll leave you with some more interesting input from the HLPE.

Agroecology and Other Innovations - Summary of the HLPE Draft Report

Caron gave a summation of the status of the current report on agroecology and ‘other innovations’, which has passed Version 0 and a period of public consultation, with draft Version 1 due to be released soon.

Part one of the report asks: What has changed in past 20 years regarding food security & nutrition (FSN)?

Acknowledgement through different definitions of FSN of the right to food. FSN until creation of FAO in 1945 was a national issue, became a global issue in second half of the century. Increasingly realised that sufficient supply doesn’t ensure FSN.

In 80s and 90s we were talking about starvation, and now we talk about 800mil suffering hunger & starvation – mostly rural poor.

We are mainly focusing on yield improvement when we are wasting a third of production.

Hunger is not decreasing quickly enough and overweight & obesity are increasing rapidly – well beyond infectious diseases – and are the number one problem in public health.

Part two of the report examines the ways in which food systems are changing, and reminds us that the question is not how to feed 9 billion people, it’s how to feed them in a sustainable way while providing decent livelihoods for producers. We can use the food system as a lever to address all the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). ‘We thought that improving supply and access to markets would help everyone but we were wrong.’

The third part of the draft report has the much-anticipated draft recommendations - what’s needed to make food systems sustainable? The answers warm a food sovereignty activist’s heart. How to improve food supply? It could be through investing in knowledge and technology, reducing food waste, internalizing externalities – they’re all possibilities. It must be through strengthening resilience – investing in small-scale ag, securing land and tenure rights, securing social equity and responsibility with social protection systems, supporting women and youth, creating decent jobs in agriculture, through investing in education for all.

The HLPE reminds us we can’t forget the need to change consumption habits, and that to do so we need to change the food environment – advertisements, subsidies, and banning some types of food like we have with alcohol and tobacco. The CFS is supposed to draft voluntary guidelines to be agreed in 2020.

Caron insists that we must improve governance of food systems and the capacity of stakeholders to participate. He says that the changes will be knowledge intensive and we have to invest in knowledge – the answers are not the ones already on the shelves. We must design new governance of food systems at all levels – including national levels.

Before closing we had a final opportunity for questions or comments, so I took the opportunity to express concern at the CSIRO’s focus over the course of the day on exports, growth, and increasing yield in spite of the obvious environmental degradation witnessed up Australia’s eastern coast over the past two years due to extreme levels of drought in a changing climate, and also in spite of the expert position presented here and for decades now that we don’t need to grow more food, we need to make food systems more democratic. The response from the CSIRO was, ‘we’re an independent science research body – we can’t take sides.’

Well AFSA can, and we choose a habitable planet for generations to come. By not joining the heavy weight of evidence showing the changes needed in our food and agriculture systems, CSIRO are taking a side too – commonly known as the wrong side of history.

The following text is the intervention delivered by AFSA President Tammi Jonas in regards to animal genetic resources for food and agriculture at the recent meetings of the UN Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture in Rome.

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We would like to congratulate the Commission on its critical work around the role of animal genetic resources for food and agriculture, with an impressive set of reports that unfortunately tell a grim story.

Selective breeding and genetically engineering livestock to increase yield has been an animal health & ethical disaster. Even Perdue, one of the world’s biggest producers of chicken, was reported to say in 2017 that they had taken the breed too far and were working to bring the genetics back towards a healthier animal than that which inhabits most intensive sheds across the globe. The FAO tells us that extinct breeds have mainly been reported among chickens.

Industrial meat producers in North America have aggressively pursued yield in highly industrialised intensive production models, and according to the FAO Report on Status and Trends this has resulted in the least number of local breeds of cattle, pigs, and poultry of any region. The countries of this region regularly work in these spaces to block urgent progress to shift away from destructive production models.

The public health risks and costs of sheds of pigs and poultry are profound. The combination of genetically similar animals in unhealthy production environments (with their attendant over-use of antimicrobials that threaten our ability to combat the most basic diseases due to the rise in antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria) is what evolutionary biologist Rob Wallace calls ‘food for flu’ – a global pandemic in the making.

The 2016 HLPE Report on ‘What Roles for Livestock?’ report highlights the need for coherence and integration among agriculture, economic, nutrition, education and health policies at the national level, and we strongly support this recommendation.

Pulling together the issues facing forest genetic resources with animal genetic resources, countries must take more holistic actions and consider ecosystems, not merely sectoral concerns. De-forestation is largely driven by industrial livestock agriculture as trees are felled to make room for monocultures of soy, corn, and other grains to be fed to animals in intensive production models. Both intensive industrial livestock production and monocultures of grain are significant contributors to loss of biodiversity and polluters of waterways, thereby also contributing to the loss of biodiversity in terrestrial and marine waters.

We small-scale farmers of the world want the governments of the world to support us in our efforts to farm agroecologically. We don’t need to upscale agroecology, we need to multiply it. Governments should move rapidly to remove barriers to small-scale livestock farmers and pastoralists, and stop subsidising industrial livestock agriculture that is destroying ecosystems from the genes up.

AFSA President Tammi Jonas is with our allies in the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty representing civil society at the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture.

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The people are speaking!

Huge first day at the Commission on Genetic Resources for Food & Agriculture here in Rome, with many interventions from those of us here representing civil society as part of the IPC for Food Sovereignty. I'll report more fully when I get home (and am not in the midst of 10-hour-meeting days), but below is one of my interventions today on the role of genetic resources for the mitigation of and adaptation to climate change:

Back home in Australia, climate change is manifest and devastating. Over the past year we have suffered unprecedented drought across the eastern states, with serious loss of livestock and wildlife as pasture turned to dirt, and then the topsoils blew away. The drought was followed by extraordinary flooding, which led to the deaths of as many as 500,000 cattle, and subsequently resulted in flood waters rushing into the sea and smothering the Great Barrier Reef, which has already suffered repeated bleaching events and is rapidly losing biodiversity as sea temperatures rise.

While the north flooded, fires burned in parts of Australia’s southernmost island of Tasmania, only to be covered by snow as they declined – in the middle of summer. It is estimated that 2% of the world’s pencil pines perished in the fires – a non-recoverable loss – some of the trees lost in the fires were over 1000 years old.

To personalize the impacts of climate change on small-scale farmers in Australia, let me share that amongst the members of the committee of the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance, in the past month alone, one of our farmers lost half his flock of heritage poultry in the northern floods, another has completely de-stocked and is carting water in for basic needs in southern Queensland, and the town of 600 people nearest my own farm was evacuated for two days under threat of a severe bushfire at its borders. Meanwhile dozens of our farmer members in Tasmania were repeatedly evacuated under threat of fire in regions that are not traditionally considered a fire risk.

I tell these stories because the sub-sectoral reports for these meetings and indeed the proposal for a scoping study on the role of GRFA in mitigation of and adaptation to climate change do not go far enough for the level of emergency we face. We must act now – every country has a responsibility to its people and the generations that will come after them to immediately transition away from logging and clear-felling of biodiverse forests for the purposes of planting monocultures – imagine standing passively while someone ripped the lungs out of your body – this is what we’re allowing with continued de-forestation across the globe.

While the Commission nor national governments can force the practitioners of industrial agriculture to sow more genetically diverse plants nor grow more diverse breeds of livestock, they can regulate the conditions under which these homogenous seeds and breeds are grown, and limit the use of harmful agri-chemicals such as the much-cited pesticides and antimicrobial pharmaceuticals for livestock. If countries ban these band-aids that are repeatedly applied to the cancer of industrial agriculture, the production models will have no choice but to shift to healthier, more resilient practices.

Every person in this room – like every child in a primary school science classroom – knows that biodiversity is critical for a resilient and sustainable food system, and that we need now more than ever resilience to deal with the impacts of climate change. It is up to the governments of the world to do what is necessary to build this resilience back into our food and agriculture systems, by supporting best those who have always and will continue to maintain and develop biodiversity – the indigenous peoples, peasants, and small-scale farmers and fishers of the world.